Launching the new NOMAD website & Slack community!

Posted by Martin Noblecourt on Jul 28, 2016

The NOMAD workshop we organized in January 27-28th in Amman, Jordan, with the support from Solidarités International and UNHCR was a great success. Many of the 106 participants from the event expressed their wish to keep the NOMAD community alive between events, which encouraged us to finish the update of our website and the launch of a Slack communication platform.

The website update have been in the pipes for a few months, but due to limited funding and time availability from the NOMAD consortium members (CartONG and iMMAP), it took us a long time to finalize it. We're happy to present it to you know! It includes a completely rebuilt back-end and database (on Drupal) that will solve the many bugs we had on the previous platform and offer a more sustainable system to continue expand it. We are also in touch with solution providers to have them updating the information on their solution. There also some additional features we'd like to add, however we will need support

Since organizing the workshops requires an important effort and we have a limited visibility on their calendar (it depends a lot on the support of the partners we find for each), the members of the NOMAD community have expressed their wish for a tool to maintain communication between two events. We have therefore launched a Slack platform to foster communication between our community members: previous workshop participants, followers, and solution providers, etc., they are already 51! The communication is still a bit slow there, we need to find our mark, but we rely on you to make it alive! Feel free to register to it. Big thanks to Asaad from MercyCorps who helped us setting it up.

NOMAD relies in its community to continue functioning and develop its services for all humanitarian organizations, please get in touch if you'd like to contribute. What we need most is time (to find new solutions, contact and test them...) so in-kind staffing support is much appreciated.

The next milestone for NOMAD will be the GeOnG conference organized by implementing partner CartONG in Chambéry, France (1h from Geneva), on October 17th to 19th. We are planning several sessions on Mobile Data Collection as part of the NOMAD initiative, and hope to see several solution providers being able to demonstrate their tool. If you'd like to present during the conference or have ideas of tools you'd like to see demonstrated, contact us: geong[at]cartong.org.